Skeptical Briefs - Committee for Skeptical Inquiryhttp://www.csicop.org/
enCopyright 20162016-12-05T14:37:08+00:00The Right StuffWed, 27 Apr 2011 15:13:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_right_stuff
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_right_stuffIn a college English class I was teaching,
filled mostly with African American and Hispanic students, a reading
assignment prompted a discussion of ethnic minorities' economic disadvantages
in the United States. Assuming we were all on the same page, as a “liberal”
I couldn't resist weighing in and expressing my own professorial indignation
on the subject as well. But one slightly older student (let's call
him Roberto), who until now had said little during the semester, politely
demurred.

“I
don't believe that,” he said. “I can't believe that.”

“Why?”
I asked.

“I
was in the Marines,” he answered. “They told me about ‘the door.'
Do you know what I'm talking about?”

No
one did, so he explained: “In the Marines they taught me that no matter
what horrible situation I might find myself in, there will be a door
that will let me out, and if I look for that door I will find it. If
you tell me because I'm Hispanic I'm screwed, I can't accept that.
I don't care what statistics you give me. I have a wife and a kid
and a job, and this school is my door, and I believe we're going to
be okay. No offense, but you're not helping me by telling me I'm
disadvantaged being Hispanic in America.”

A
lively class discussion ensued, and my own head spun.

The
facts of minority disadvantage notwithstanding, for the first time I
realized how an American mindset-perhaps the American mindset-can place itself
in flat-out opposition to a logically constraining reality, and that's
not necessarily a bad thing.

Roberto's
perspective reminded me of “the right stuff” that Tom Wolfe
explored in his 1979 book of the same name. Wolfe was describing the
essential fighter-pilot mentality of the early NASA Mercury Program
astronauts of the 1960s. They ignored the grim statistics on combat
and experimental aviation and instead viewed mission failure (death)
under any circumstances as the result of individual
human error-avoidable by those endowed with a sufficient
amount of a particular but somewhat ineffable combination of steely
confidence and initiative: “the right stuff.”

This
willful trumping of circumstantial disadvantage by sheer faith in innate
resourcefulness harkens back to a more primal American ethos, that of
the early New England Puritans. America's first European settlers
believed that those among them predestined to be saved also had “the
right [spiritual] stuff” and were therefore divinely allowed to prosper
in their new land. Those who didn't have it failed. Simply put, personal
courage bespoke salvation in this world and
the next.

It
has often been noted how this same faith in self-demonstrating salvation
has, in a more secularized form, permeated the cultural DNA of American
society ever since. Social commentators during the nation's nineteenth-century
industrial boom idealized the innately proactive “self-made man”
and stigmatized the will-deficient “born loser.” If economic socialism
remains an anathema in American public discourse today-at least as
an abstract proposition-it is because our citizens just can't grasp
how personal self-affirmation can be achieved through federal dispensation.
(And also, why should slackers be saved?) Similarly, if labor-union
membership is at a record low, it's probably because American workers,
deep down, still believe that individual gumption and resourcefulness
will get them what they need-or else they don't deserve it. (And
collective bargaining seems like just more socialism for noncompetitive
losers.)

But
who knows? Maybe this trait of optimistic individualism is truly genetic.
The great majority of Americans are
the descendants of-or are themselves-immigrants who believed enough
in themselves and their personal chances
of success to jump headlong into a rough-and-tumble new world. So we
are literally a self-selected gene pool of
risk takers, hardwired to believe in Roberto's door.

To
be sure, it is no coincidence that, as social critic Barbara Ehrenreich
has observed, Americans have also been exploited since the mid-nineteenth
century by a massive and massively profitable “positive thinking”
industry. Today, despite the hard-nosed economic realists piping in
the media and genuine suffering caused by the recession, Americans remain
awash in the monetized optimism business. Whether fronted by megastar
self-help boosters like Oprah Winfrey, alternative-medicine gurus like
Deepak Chopra, or corporate motivational speakers like Tony Robbins,
the message has never been louder: if you believe-really believe-you
can (diet, heal, profit, succeed, whatever), then you can! But as
Ehrenreich has pointed out, the essential cheat in this message is
not in the dreams themselves but in the seductive ease, the implied
“wishing makes it so” means, by which these dreams may be realized.

If
we Americans seem so susceptible to these profiteering pied pipers of
confidence, it may be because, ironically, they really had us at “hello.”
Despite all the stark statistics, sober analysis, and smell-the-coffee
reality dispensed before and after the recent financial crises, odds
are that we (or more likely our children) will again recklessly invest
in pie-in-the-sky IPOs that pop like bubbles. We will again, if permitted,
take out mortgages we should rationally anticipate not being able to
pay off. And count on it: we will again crash and burn, simply because
we don't believe we will. Perhaps it is in the nature of how true
liberty works. If we are really free in America, then we must be free
to be fools, too. We will pay for our mistakes (and yes, the burden
will fall much more on some than others-we need to do something about
that) and then we will make more.

For
better or for worse, there is clearly some fundamental expression of
American character in this disposition of perennial, reckless optimism.
Not sure? Answer me this: do you or don't you, in your gut, expect
America to come out of this recession sooner rather than later and (eventually)
get to Mars? I rest my case.

]]>&lsquo;What&rsquo;s Your Sign?&rsquo;: Why (part of) the Age of Aquarius Is Still with UsSun, 01 Jun 2003 16:19:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/whats_your_sign_why_part_of_the_age_of_aquarius_is_still_with_us
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/whats_your_sign_why_part_of_the_age_of_aquarius_is_still_with_usWe have always lived in uncertain times. It is understandable therefore how, in a world continually threatened by droughts, floods, famines, plagues, and wars, people would seek the imagined security promised by prophetic systems of belief such as astrology which, however cryptically or equivocally, claim to reveal a reliable order to things.

And yet when we hear of contemporary world leaders or their family members seeking the balm of such promised security, the more sophisticated of us often stand amazed. For example recently we have become aware that Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, consults psychics, and that Senator Hillary Clinton, when she was First Lady, sought similar spiritual guidance. And, of course, we all remember that Nancy Reagan as First Lady had a regular personal astrologer. So why won’t this vestige of the Age of Aquarius go away?

It is true that occult belief systems have from the very origins of Western civilization long guided and justified personal and political hopes, fears and desires. Traditionally they were the hopes, fears and desires of pharaohs, caesars, and fuhrers (and their spouses) who could afford to keep private seers on hand for immediate consultation, on military campaigns, treaties, marriages, and so forth. But while the concerns of the common folk for their own lives were of course no less pressing to them, it was not until the Renaissance, the printing press, literacy, and an expanded middle class that more widespread and detailed familiarity with divination systems like astrology became possible, and then popular.

Despite three hundred years of science and rationalism, the impulse to divination remains with us today, though this is at least partially understandable. After all, the world still appears to many of us no less uncertain and dangerous. In fact we ourselves seem to add new technological and ecological numbers to the roulette wheel of potential human disasters at an increasing rate. In this way, at least, the “Aquarian” proliferation of mystical beliefs in the 1960s and 1970s can be perceived as a normal social phenomenon in response to anxious times. The novelty, if there was one, lay in the sheer speed of the proliferation of these beliefs, facilitated by unprecedented media resources, and the media’s own commercial interest in the baby boomers’ every quirk.

Taken in its more gauzy and rosy colored aspects, the 1960s Age of Aquarius can be abstracted sociologically as a popular mass delusion, a psychological denial or a retreat from the harsh geopolitical realities of the new and frightening nuclear age, the cold war, and the Vietnam War. However, it need not be seen only as that.

From a political perspective, it was much more than merely a characteristic escapist response to an uncomfortable human condition. Then as now, the thrust of the so-called New Age philosophies reflected a very deliberate purpose or will on the part of many of their adherents. That purpose was to urge a more benign and humane set of priorities upon the specifically manmade political sphere of things, the sphere ostensibly over which we can have some measure of control.

When, in the 1967 musical Hair, lyricists Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote: “When the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars,” many of us, including those who had no personal interest or faith at all in astrology per se, wholeheartedly hummed along with these celestial events very much aware that this was a metaphorical call for better alignment of more mundane social forces down here on Earth.

It is of course ironic that President Reagan, who as governor of California back in the 1960s was a prominent representative of the conservative “establishment” in reaction to which the Aquarian Age arose, should ultimately be revealed as influenced by astrology in whatever indirect or minuscule way through his wife Nancy. But after all, Nancy Reagan’s interest then, and Cherie Blair’s flirtation now, with the supernatural merely returns such beliefs to their traditional function as psychological comfort for national leaders and their families, in their need to formulate or rationalize difficult and stressful decisions.

By the way, President Bush, being born on July 6, 1946, astrologically happens to be a Cancer. That probably means 2003 will be a momentous year for him, one abounding with “both great opportunities and grave dangers.” And that means it will be for us too.